Performance

For the most part overall performance benchmarks on a motherboard are more a formality than anything else. What we are looking for are numbers that don’t perform up to the average, in other words we are keeping an eye for any weird bugs that you might run into while using the board day to day. It’s hard to compare the numbers to any other boards because they are really based on the memory, CPU, and video card more than anything else (a little on the SSD as well in some tests).

Finally getting a third X99 board tested gives us a better look at the overall performance you can expect to see. The X99S MPower performed on par with the other two boards for the most part. The time difference between this review and the two launch reviews does provide a bit of an improvement from updated drivers though. This could especially be seen in PCMark 8. Oddly enough I dove into the breakdown expecting to see that video card driver improvements helped with PCMark but surprisingly it actually performed a little slower on the GPU tests but pulled ahead with everything else. Most of the game benchmarks were on par but Bioshock Infinite did see a nice bump up to 106.25 FPS.